They consume music in order to beallowed to weep.

The actual function o f sentim ental music lies rather in the tem poraryrelease given to the awareness that one has missed fulfillment.

Music today is largely a social cement

This natural language for the American listener stems from his earliest musical experiences,the nursery rhymes, the hymns he sings in Sunday school, the little tuneshe whistles on his way home from school. All these are vastly m ore important in the form ation o f musical language than his ability to distinguishthe beginning o f Brahm s’s Third Symphony from that of his Second.

Im itation offers a lead for coming to grips with the basic reasons for it.The musical standards of popular music were originally developed by acom petitive process.

This dualism is not developed in a schematicway so that first the phrase o f the strings is elaborated, then the answer ofthe winds, and then the string them e is mechanically repeated.

For example, in the introductionof the first m ovem ent of B eethoven’s Seventh Symphony the second them e(in C-major) gets its true meaning only from the context. Only through thewhole does it acquire its particular lyrical and expressive quality— that is,a whole built up o f its very contrast with the cantus firmus—\ike characterof the first them e. Taken in isolation the second them e would be disrobedto insignificance

It is not overt like the latter but hidden behind a veneer ofindividual “effects” whose prescriptions are handled as the experts’ secret,however open this secret may be to musicians generally.

This inexorable device guarantees that regardlesso f what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced

These assumptions concern notonly what takes place in the building but go deep into the nature of humanrelationships themselves.

It would not be stretching matters too far to call this building a sacredspace.

In general, discreet colors are favored: pastel, ocher or whitefor the piasterwork; the rich tones of natural wood; hangings in the colorsof natural dyes; seats upholstered in deep red, slate blue or soft sea green,with aisle carpets in matching or tastefully contrasting colors.

We buy a booklet and thumb through it, more interested at this mo -ment perhaps in the crowd of people who, like ourselves,

What’s really going on here?

What does it mean when this performance (of this work) takes place at thistime, in this place, with these participants?

One wonders, in that case, why we should bother performing musi-cal works at all, when we could just sit at home, like Brahms, and readthem as if they were novels.

“The supreme reality of art,” he wrote, “is the isolated, self-contained work.”

In addition, musicology is, almost by definition, concerned withWestern classical music, while other musics, including even Western popu -lar musics, are dealt with under the rubric of ethnomusicology (the realmusical study of Western popular musics, in their own terms rather thanthose of classical music, is only just beginning and does not yet dare to callitself musicology).

“What is the meaning of music?”